Anyone who claims with a straight face in 2004 that "C++ compilers are untrustworthy" is trolling. Sorry, rabid penguin lovers.
I love it when language bigots forestall any reasonable discussion by preemptively accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being a language bigot. Slashdot, of course, believe that Linus can do no wrong, so none of it ever applies to him...
After having conversations with him myself, I can state my honest belief that Linus doesn't understand how to use C++, and will simply assert that "it's just C anyway" no matter how many times he's proven wrong. He's a smart guy, but he's got his blinders on in some respects.
Given that the man taught himself Linux for the purposes of running his own website, most of us would qualify him as intelligent.
I skim over his blogs about every other month, and recently he's taken up poker as a hobby. He's studied, practiced, etc, and blogs the stores of his experiences playing (LA, Vegas, and so on).
What have I learned by reading them? No, being smarter than the average person does not automatically make you a better poker player. Other things do.
Joe Haldeman had single-molecule thick condoms in one of his hard-SF novels, Buying Time, published back in the late 80's. In the book, the TV adverts for the condoms had to use polarized lightspots in the studio so that the condoms would actually be visible for the cameras.
A friend and colleague of mine believes that every ballot should have a simple multiple-choice test. Nothing requiring a History or Political Science degree; nothing needing math skills. Just a few basic questions (randomly selected from a large database for each ballot, to try and defeat cheat sheets or other "prepping" by party pundits) to check whether the voter has a basic grasp of consequences.
For example, maybe you believe that all citizens should be medically cared for equally, even though that will place an increased burden on taxpayers -- or maybe you believe that medical care should be limited to what you can pay for, even though that means some citizens will fall through the cracks. There are arguments either way, and it's your choice on what you believe, but you need to have a clue as to what the outcome and impact of your belief is.
So, questions like "which of these candidates would most likely change <current policy> to do <foo>"? If you can't demonstrate that you have a grasp of what would happen if a given candidate/party got into office, your vote is discarded.
The trick is to word a sufficient number of questions in a non-biased manner. And to convince people that the completely unaware citizen shouldn't be allowed to control the politics of the country... which of course won't fly with a government who likes easily-led sheep.
It's called Wily, and damn if it ain't the weirdest editor I have ever used. Insane fun, too, and fits the Unix model of putting together arbitrary pieces to build tools as needed.
There are no button or menus per se. There's an initial group of one-line-high windows with some words in them ("Save", "New", etc) and a major window (now we'd call them "tabs" but in Wily they're just windows) for the file... or for more commands... or whatever. You can have a tab hooked to a shell, for example.
Middle-clicking on a word, or on selected text, runs that command. Maybe it's builtin. Maybe it's a complicated shell pipeline. Any text, anywhere; the command words in the initial small windows are just plain text. If you don't like them, backspace over them and write your own. Nothing special about which window you're clicking in; for example, if the words "Save" and "Quit" (capitalized) happen to appear in the body text of your program or paper or whatever, middle click on them to save and exit.
Clipboard operations and a number of other things are all done with mouse chords. Left-click and right-sweep performs such-and-such, etc.
It wasn't a flip answer. It was...
on
Rob Pike Responds
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· Score: 1
And they follow exactly that curve: the first Mote book is set in a time when the Empire is still strong and vigourous. The sequel is some (15 or 25) years later, and government doesn't move nearly as fast. The blockade is rife with corruption of all the same kinds we see today in American military contracting.
Dunno about the other story you mention, but it sounds entirely plausible. There oughta be a good index of sci-fi stories....
were set in a monarchy for precisely this reason. The authors (Niven and Pournelle) wanted to explore a future where the rulers concentrated more on doing the job than they did on getting the job. A child born to the throne, the idea went, can be trained from a young age on how to do it well. (Assuming the society as a whole is still functioning properly, not gotten corrupt or decadent, etc.)
"Do we 'believe' in a monarchy? Not necessarily," they wrote in a later essay. "Do we believe it's/possible/? Damn straight."
Okay, that's reassuring. I've got the "enable disk" thing checked (actually, it's checked and grayed out, so I wouldn't know how to disable it even if I wanted to). It's set up for Windows mode, but I haven't been able to plug it into another Windows computer yet. Will keep trying...
...is that it can't be used as a straight USB (or FireWire, IIRC) device. You need additional software on the host.
For example, my friend had a hundred-odd megs of remixed music he wanted me to listen to. Schweet, I said, iPod-as-hard-drive to the rescue. Plugged it in to his computer's USB port, and got an error about "unknown USB device".
I can plug it into my Windows box, however, and it will be mounted as a drive, with certain immutable "subdirectories" mapping onto different iPod functions. I suspect that's where the host-side software comes in, since USB doesn't allow for the device to send "oh, and here's how to interpret this filesystem that isn't actually a filesystem" notes. (I hope I'm wrong. Please tell me if I am. USB is not my forte.)
The host-side software is installed as part of iTunes, but I'd rather not go around installing iTunes on every computer I might want to plug an iPod into. Apart from the hassle, iTunes wants to do a few too many things to the iPod automatically (unless the defaults are all changed).
He could have copy'n'pasted other news sites' content to his own blog, added some banner ads to make money, and then sucked michael and CmdrTaco off so they would post anything he submits as "news".
Really, Roland needs to become an editor, or at least be given his own category. He can astroturf for cash all he wants then, and we'll be able to ignore his stories.
...which about sums it up. You need some pretty kickass foam to survive reentry, even partially.
And it's gotta be cheap, if you're using that much of it. Creating enough buoyancy to keep a large object afloat -- again, with only a partial (and unknown!) amount of foam remaining -- is going to take a lot of it.
And it's gotta be non-soluble, if it's supposed to survive in an ocean long enough for a recovery team to find it.
Then you gotta make it relatively non-toxic, because it will be entering our biosphere.
Probably other problems I can't think of immediately. So yeah, it's likely a good idea, but there are a lot of things standing in the way. DuPont Corp, or whoever, could probably use some help solving them, if you know any bright chemical engineers.
Wrong. At the time F911 came out, there was no number at all. Only in response to the movie was the number created. (And it's not 888, either)
We called the number, and it was well before Moore decided to make his film. Politicians lie, but not to the degree of simply making up a phone number. (Do you think nobody would ever call it? They certainly never made that mistake.)
The best thing that can be said about Moore's film is that it has a good soundtrack.
I hate Bush and his whole administration, but I cannot hold up Moore's film as anything other than highly misleading propoganda. He did way more than "put his own spin on things".
For example, he shows a clip of some politician claiming "and we've set up an 800 number so you can call us and complain," and inserts a little subtitle claiming "this isn't true." The truth is that the phone number was (and still is) a 1-888 number, which is just as toll-free as 1-800 numbers are. But because (int)888 != (int)800, Moore tells us that the "800 number" statement is false, and implies that the entire statement is a lie.
Another example: Moore makes a big stink over
only one member of Congress with a child enlisted in the military in Iraq. What Moore carefully leaves out is all the Congresscritters with children deployed elsewhere, or not yet deployed, or -- this is the nice one -- serving as officers in Iraq. The latter don't count, see, because they're not enlisted. Moore deliberately relies on audience members to hear "enlisted in the military" and include all ranks and services at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. This is a Good Thing.
Anyone who claims with a straight face in 2004 that "C++ compilers are untrustworthy" is trolling. Sorry, rabid penguin lovers.
I love it when language bigots forestall any reasonable discussion by preemptively accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being a language bigot. Slashdot, of course, believe that Linus can do no wrong, so none of it ever applies to him...
After having conversations with him myself, I can state my honest belief that Linus doesn't understand how to use C++, and will simply assert that "it's just C anyway" no matter how many times he's proven wrong. He's a smart guy, but he's got his blinders on in some respects.
Yeah, pregnancies take 58 to 65 days. How long starting from a test tube?
Heck, even during growth you keep having to transplant them to larger and larger test tubes.
...which won't be out until Wednesday or Thursday for people w/o subscriptions. Relevent to this topic are the two best stories:
"Countdown to The Recount 2004" ("How to make your vote recount", "When will your next president be appointed", etc)
"Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On November 3rd" (ouch!)
Too long have you coveted my BFG9000. Too long have you haunted its shiny green kaboominess.
A classic misquote. The verse actually runs, "The love of money is the root of all evil," but this joke wouldn't be as funny that way.
Still, people's "serious" attacks on various Christian attitudes towards money usually hinge on the misquote. Just some trivia to brighten your day.
Given that the man taught himself Linux for the purposes of running his own website, most of us would qualify him as intelligent.
I skim over his blogs about every other month, and recently he's taken up poker as a hobby. He's studied, practiced, etc, and blogs the stores of his experiences playing (LA, Vegas, and so on).
What have I learned by reading them? No, being smarter than the average person does not automatically make you a better poker player. Other things do.
Joe Haldeman had single-molecule thick condoms in one of his hard-SF novels, Buying Time, published back in the late 80's. In the book, the TV adverts for the condoms had to use polarized lightspots in the studio so that the condoms would actually be visible for the cameras.
"Airskins. All you feel... is safe."
Dunno about the OS, but it occured at UC Berkeley, so it was almost certainly a sendmail exploit.
A friend and colleague of mine believes that every ballot should have a simple multiple-choice test. Nothing requiring a History or Political Science degree; nothing needing math skills. Just a few basic questions (randomly selected from a large database for each ballot, to try and defeat cheat sheets or other "prepping" by party pundits) to check whether the voter has a basic grasp of consequences.
For example, maybe you believe that all citizens should be medically cared for equally, even though that will place an increased burden on taxpayers -- or maybe you believe that medical care should be limited to what you can pay for, even though that means some citizens will fall through the cracks. There are arguments either way, and it's your choice on what you believe, but you need to have a clue as to what the outcome and impact of your belief is.
So, questions like "which of these candidates would most likely change <current policy> to do <foo>"? If you can't demonstrate that you have a grasp of what would happen if a given candidate/party got into office, your vote is discarded.
The trick is to word a sufficient number of questions in a non-biased manner. And to convince people that the completely unaware citizen shouldn't be allowed to control the politics of the country... which of course won't fly with a government who likes easily-led sheep.
It's called Wily, and damn if it ain't the weirdest editor I have ever used. Insane fun, too, and fits the Unix model of putting together arbitrary pieces to build tools as needed.
There are no button or menus per se. There's an initial group of one-line-high windows with some words in them ("Save", "New", etc) and a major window (now we'd call them "tabs" but in Wily they're just windows) for the file... or for more commands... or whatever. You can have a tab hooked to a shell, for example.
Middle-clicking on a word, or on selected text, runs that command. Maybe it's builtin. Maybe it's a complicated shell pipeline. Any text, anywhere; the command words in the initial small windows are just plain text. If you don't like them, backspace over them and write your own. Nothing special about which window you're clicking in; for example, if the words "Save" and "Quit" (capitalized) happen to appear in the body text of your program or paper or whatever, middle click on them to save and exit.
Clipboard operations and a number of other things are all done with mouse chords. Left-click and right-sweep performs such-and-such, etc.
..."mu".
And they follow exactly that curve: the first Mote book is set in a time when the Empire is still strong and vigourous. The sequel is some (15 or 25) years later, and government doesn't move nearly as fast. The blockade is rife with corruption of all the same kinds we see today in American military contracting.
Dunno about the other story you mention, but it sounds entirely plausible. There oughta be a good index of sci-fi stories....
were set in a monarchy for precisely this reason. The authors (Niven and Pournelle) wanted to explore a future where the rulers concentrated more on doing the job than they did on getting the job. A child born to the throne, the idea went, can be trained from a young age on how to do it well. (Assuming the society as a whole is still functioning properly, not gotten corrupt or decadent, etc.)
"Do we 'believe' in a monarchy? Not necessarily," they wrote in a later essay. "Do we believe it's /possible/? Damn straight."
I suspect he's one of the hordes of (mostly C) coders who believe that using a C++ library requires you to write your entire application in C++.
Then again, if he's writing in straight C these days, I suspect that learning new and inconvenient facts might not be what he's looking for right now.
I think you misspelled "impact (after another management decision results in trivial math errors going uncaught)" there.
Okay, that's reassuring. I've got the "enable disk" thing checked (actually, it's checked and grayed out, so I wouldn't know how to disable it even if I wanted to). It's set up for Windows mode, but I haven't been able to plug it into another Windows computer yet. Will keep trying...
Thanks for the note!
...is that it can't be used as a straight USB (or FireWire, IIRC) device. You need additional software on the host.
For example, my friend had a hundred-odd megs of remixed music he wanted me to listen to. Schweet, I said, iPod-as-hard-drive to the rescue. Plugged it in to his computer's USB port, and got an error about "unknown USB device".
I can plug it into my Windows box, however, and it will be mounted as a drive, with certain immutable "subdirectories" mapping onto different iPod functions. I suspect that's where the host-side software comes in, since USB doesn't allow for the device to send "oh, and here's how to interpret this filesystem that isn't actually a filesystem" notes. (I hope I'm wrong. Please tell me if I am. USB is not my forte.)
The host-side software is installed as part of iTunes, but I'd rather not go around installing iTunes on every computer I might want to plug an iPod into. Apart from the hassle, iTunes wants to do a few too many things to the iPod automatically (unless the defaults are all changed).
He could have copy'n'pasted other news sites' content to his own blog, added some banner ads to make money, and then sucked michael and CmdrTaco off so they would post anything he submits as "news".
Really, Roland needs to become an editor, or at least be given his own category. He can astroturf for cash all he wants then, and we'll be able to ignore his stories.
...which about sums it up. You need some pretty kickass foam to survive reentry, even partially.
And it's gotta be cheap, if you're using that much of it. Creating enough buoyancy to keep a large object afloat -- again, with only a partial (and unknown!) amount of foam remaining -- is going to take a lot of it.
And it's gotta be non-soluble, if it's supposed to survive in an ocean long enough for a recovery team to find it.
Then you gotta make it relatively non-toxic, because it will be entering our biosphere.
Probably other problems I can't think of immediately. So yeah, it's likely a good idea, but there are a lot of things standing in the way. DuPont Corp, or whoever, could probably use some help solving them, if you know any bright chemical engineers.
We called the number, and it was well before Moore decided to make his film. Politicians lie, but not to the degree of simply making up a phone number. (Do you think nobody would ever call it? They certainly never made that mistake.)
The best thing that can be said about Moore's film is that it has a good soundtrack.
...and after they'd been dating for several weeks, Scott Adams drew one strip where Dilbert shows up to work with his necktie completely flat.
I hate Bush and his whole administration, but I cannot hold up Moore's film as anything other than highly misleading propoganda. He did way more than "put his own spin on things".
For example, he shows a clip of some politician claiming "and we've set up an 800 number so you can call us and complain," and inserts a little subtitle claiming "this isn't true." The truth is that the phone number was (and still is) a 1-888 number, which is just as toll-free as 1-800 numbers are. But because (int)888 != (int)800, Moore tells us that the "800 number" statement is false, and implies that the entire statement is a lie.
Another example: Moore makes a big stink over only one member of Congress with a child enlisted in the military in Iraq. What Moore carefully leaves out is all the Congresscritters with children deployed elsewhere, or not yet deployed, or -- this is the nice one -- serving as officers in Iraq. The latter don't count, see, because they're not enlisted. Moore deliberately relies on audience members to hear "enlisted in the military" and include all ranks and services at once.
The most balanced objective take on the file I've seen so far is the point by point list of deceits.
Oh, damn, you're right, I got chunks of stuff confused with other chunks of stuff. Thanks for setting me straight.